First person – Neha Jadhav Giridhar and Bita Hambrecht

ABSTRACT First Person is a series of interviews with the first authors of a selection of papers published in Biology Open, helping researchers promote themselves alongside their papers. Neha Jadhav Giridhar and Bita Hambrecht are co-first authors on ‘ Temporal transcriptomic profiling of human three-dimensional neuromuscular co-cultures’, published in BiO. Neha Jadhav is a PhD student in the lab of Dr Patrick Lüningschrör at Institute of Clinical Neurobiology, University Hospital Würzburg, Germany, investigating stem-cell-based models to unravel cellular and molecular mechanisms driving neurodegeneration and neuromuscular dysfunction. Bita conducted the research described in this article while a PhD candidate and postdoctoral researcher in Dr Patrick Lüningschrör's lab. She is now a postdoc in the lab of Dr Ola Grimsholm at Institute for Pathophysiology and Allergy Research at the Medical University of Vienna, Austria, developing bioengineered human tissue and patient-derived in vitro models to study disease mechanisms in neurobiology and immune responses.